Free The Tomorrow File by Lawrence Sanders Page A

too.
    The copter was still on the front lawn, and I supposed the ef pilot was in the guesthouse, waiting.
    My parents’ home had been built in 1904 by a wealthy Detroit brewer. I was bom a little after midnight in my mother’s bedroom on the second floor.
    The house was a charming horror, a dizziness of gables, turrets, minarets. My father had compounded the insanity by adding a glass-enclosed terrace, a futuristic plastisteel guesthouse, and a boathouse on the river done in Tudor style with beams brought from England. There was an antique coat of arms over the doorway with the motto: Aut Vincere Aut Mori. I told my father it meant “I shall conquer death,” and no one ever enlightened him. He was pleased with it, and had Aut Vincere Aut Mori engraved on his personal stationery.
    My suite was on the third floor. A huge bedroom had a four-poster bed, two enormous armoires that held most of my civilian clothing, chests of drawers, an ornate, gilt-edged pier glass, a few faded prints of sailing ships on the walls. An open doorway (no door) led to a modernized nest. Then there was a small study that was all business: desk, swivel chair, film spindle racks, reading machine, a tape recorder that took cassettes, cartridges, and open-end reels, a TV set, a small refrigerator, and file cabinets.
    The final room was my “secret place.” It was always kept locked. I had, as far as I knew, the only key. Each time I left to go back to GPA-1,1 glued a fine thread from jamb to door, about 20 cm above the floor. The thread had never been disturbed.
    Two walls of this hideaway were the lower slopes of the mansard roof, interrupted by two gabled windows facing south and east. The inside walls and ceiling were plaster, painted white a long time ago. Now they were almost ocher. There was a frazzled rag rug on the planked floor, a sprung Morris chair with the leather seat and back cushion dried and cracking. There was a metal smoking stand, a bottle of my father’s natural brandy and a single glass, a small bookshelf that held four books.
    That’s all there was. Nothing very significant. Except for the four books.
    In 1998, most “books” were published on film spindles, designed for lap and desk reading machines. The few actual books printed were paperbound. To buy a hardcover book, you had to patronize a rare book store, an antique shop, or a merchant who sold secondhand junk. Practically everything ever published had been reproduced on microfilm. It took up so much* less space, people simply sold or gave away their actual books, or threw them out. As my father would say, the film spindles were convenient.
    In 1992, to escape a sudden and unexpected summer shower, I had ducked into a tiny decrepit antique bookstore on Morse Avenue (formerly Second Avenue in Manhattan). I had passed it a few times previously, and was vaguely aware it specialized in obso art books. How it survived I do not know, since you could buy film spindles of most of the world’s great art, and the color reproduction in a viewing machine was incomparably more vivid than on a printed page.
    Waiting for the summer squall to pass, I idly picked up and leafed through a heavily illustrated catalogue of an art exhibit that had been held in New York in 1968. The artist was an em I had never heard of. His name was Egon Schiele.
    It would be melodramatic to declare that coming upon that old art exhibition catalogue by accident on a rainy summer afternoon changed my life. It did not change my life, of course. I continued my service in DOB as before (I was then Executive Assistant to AssDepDirRad). I visited my parents, ate, slept, used around; nothing in my life changed.
    But something in me was altered. I knew it now. How I was altered by seeing the work of Egon Schiele, in what manner and to what extent, I did not compute then and did not now.
    Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter, born in 1890, stopped in 1918. He was twenty-eight. He was the son of a railroad server. He